Building a Barbecue
Previous episode: Housewarming Next episode: Country Club Dance http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s29/ABMfisher/FeelingCement.jpg http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s29/ABMfisher/BurgerRing.jpg Plot Ricky has a week's vacation off work, and all he's doing is sitting around, bored, criticizing Lucy's housework. Lucy wants him out of her hair, so she makes a plan to get Ricky and Fred started on building the barbecue in the backyard that they've been planning. Lucy and Ethel pretend to want to start the job themselves, hoping that the men will take over when they see how clueless their wives are about the whole thing. But Ricky merely puts them to work, giving them jobs to do to help out himself and Fred. Things get worse when Ricky finds that Lucy took off her wedding ring (shown above) and put it on a bench before getting her hands dirty. Ricky keeps telling Lucy that taking off her ring is the easiest way to lose it. To teach her a lesson, Ricky puts the ring in his shirt pocket. When Lucy realizes her ring is missing, she thinks it has to be in the cement used to make the barbecue. Lucy and Ethel stay up all night taking apart the barbecue and building it again. Sadly, though, they do all this work for nothing, and Lucy doesn't find her ring. They spend the rest of the night putting the barbecue back together, the finished product looking like a total disaster. The next day, the gang sits down to eat hamburgers cooked on the brand-new barbecue. Lucy thinks her ring's long gone by now, since Little Ricky used the shirt Ricky put the ring in to use on his kite, and the kite blew away. But Lucy gets a big surprise when she bites into her hamburger. Her ring's inside the meat! Ricky figures out that, when he bent down to pick up the plate of raw meat yesterday, the ring must have fallen out of his pocket and into the meat. Trivia *Lucy has a ritual of taking off her wedding ring each morning before doing housework and dishes and placing it safely on the windowsill. *When Ricky says he'll buy Lucy a brand-new ring with huge diamonds all the way around, Lucy says that she wants the old ring with the little diamonds halfway around. This is a reference to what happened in real life. When Lucy and Desi first got married in 1940, Desi only had time to buy Lucy a cheap brass ring from Woolworth's. He later bought Lucy a beautiful aquamarine ring, but Lucy still loved the cheap ring just as much as the expensive one. Lucy wears her cheap, original wedding ring in the early seasons of the show, but you can see her aquamarine ring starting around season 4. *Ricky and Fred carefully planned making the barbecue. They even made blueprints for how to construct it, something Lucy and Ethel never thought to do. *When Bill Frawley is saying the line about Ethel's fingers being so fat that she can't remove her wedding ring, Desi Arnaz finds the line so amusing, he silently mouths the words right along with Frawley! *Lucy and Ethel started re-building the barbecue at 2:30 in the morning. *Instead of hamburgers the night the barbecue's cement has to dry, the gang has macaroni and cheese for dinner. *Ricky says they don't have tornadoes in Connecticut. Though not common tornadoes are by no means strangers to the state. *If you look closely as Lucy dumps out the bricks, one of them hits Vivian Vance in the ankle! Quotes *Lucy: The house gets pretty dirty if I don't do my "dustin' and swippin'" every day. *Lucy: Honey, why don't you call up Little Freddie Mertz and ask him to come over and play with you? *Ricky: A piece of lint- you must have missed it with the carpet sweeper. Lucy: Thank you very much. Ricky: What do you want me to do with it? Lucy: Why don't you get yourself a scrapbook and start a lint collection? *Ricky: What's the meaning of this? Lucy: "What's the meaning of this"? Ricky: Yes! Lucy: Well, this is my wedding ring. It means we're married. It means you're my husband, I"m your wife, and we have a child by this union. Ricky: I know all of that. Why do you have to take it off? Lucy: Because dishwater is very hard on diamond rings. Ricky: When we got married, you said you will never take your ring off! Lucy: When we got married, YOU said that dishwater would never touch these lily-white hands. Ricky: Well, I bought you a pair of rubber gloves, didn't I? *Little RIcky: Daddy, let's go fly my new kite. Lucy: Yeah, go fly a kite! *Lucy: Oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do with Ricky home for a whole week. He's drivin' me crazy! Ethel: Oh, now you know how I feel EVERY week! *Ethel: Why don't you use the method I always use when I want Fred to do something? Lucy: What's that? Ethel: Well, I start the project myself, and then Fred sees me, and he says, "Ethel, that's not the way to do that!" And then he goes ahead and does it himself. Lucy: Ethel, you're getting to be a pretty tricky thinker! Ethel: Well, I've been around the old master for so long, I guess some of you has rubbed off on me. *Lucy: And then I figured that the grill should be up, say, about that high... (puts hand way above head) ...to keep the smoke out of our eyes. *Lucy: Blueprints? Ricky: The plans! Lucy: Oh, who needs plans? We'll just create as we go along! Ethel: Yeah, we thought we'd just adlib this barbecue. *Lucy: (staring at cement) It doesn't seem to be mixing together very well! Ethel: Maybe we're supposed to help it along *Fred: Well, that's one problem I'll never have with Ethel. Ricky: She's careful her ring, huh? Fred: No, her fingers have gotten so fat, she can't get her ring off! *Ricky: (trying to get Lucy to realize her ring's missing) Lucy, be sure that, when you're ready, to give Fred a RING. Fred: Yeah, Lucy, give me a RING! Lucy: What are you talking about? I'll call you on the intercom! *Lucy: Now, Ethel, I'd do it for you if you'd lost your wedding ring. Ethel: If I lost my wedding ring, we wouldn't have to find it. We'd just have to buy another box of Cracker Jack. *Ethel: You know, it's times like these I wish I had kept a diary. Lucy: Why? Ethel: Just so I could write, "Dear diary, tonight I went out in the backyard in my nightgown and felt wet cement." *Ethel: Lucy, that's the last of it. Where can your ring be? Lucy: (crying) I don't know! *Ethel: I coudl have been in a nice, quiet apartment in New York. No, I had to move to Connecticut, so I could be near you. *Lucy: It's times like this when you know what friends are for. Ethel: If I'd known this was what friends are for, I'd have signed up as an enemy... *Lucy: (stalling) You shouldn't look at a barbecue on an empty stomach! *Fred: Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle! Ricky: Never mind about your relatives! *Ricky: This barbecue is a monstrosity! Fred: I'll say! I've seen better things built by a beaver with his tail in a sling! *Ricky: They don't have tornadoes in Connecticut, either as earthquakes. Lucy: Boy, this is a dull state! Ricky: I'll tell you what I think it was. Lucy: What? Ricky: A couple of hurricanes. Lucy and Ethel: Hurricanes! Ricky: Yeah, Hurricane Lucy and Hurricane Ethel! *Ethel: Yes, I was in on the shenanigans. And I'm dead tired from being up all night liftin' those heavy bricks, and if you say one more word to me, Fred Mertz, I"m gonna take YOU apart and put YOU back together again! Fred: I just asked, honeybunch! *Ricky: Look- I'll buy you a new ring with big diamonds all around it. Lucy: I don't want one with big diamonds all around it. I want MINE with the little diamonds halfway around it! *Lucy: Just like it was 16 years ago, only then my ring didn't have mustard and relish all over it!﻿